The free world is the new continent in cyberspace that we have built so we can live here in freedom. It's impossible to live in freedom in the old world of cyberspace, where every program has its feudal lord that bullies and mistreats the users. So, to live in freedom we have to build a new continent. Because this is a virtual continent, it has room for everyone, and there are no immigration restrictions. - Richard Stallman -

MythDora is a specialized operating system based on Fedora and MythTV. Since 2009, the version number comes from the version of Fedora used followed by the version of MythTV used. For example, the current version 12.23 uses Fedora 12 and MythTV 0.23. Like KnoppMyth, MythDora is designed to simplify the installation of MythTV on a home theatre PC. MythDora has since version 10.21 had Live CD support.

In addition to MythTV and its plugins, Mythdora includes extra Linux packages that are necessary for MythTV to run, and drivers for hardware commonly encountered in machines intended to run MythTV. Also included in Mythdora are several video game emulators, and extra tools and scripts. These aid with the initial configuration of the system and allow the user to perform such tasks as rebooting the machine and backing up program data, directly through the MythTV interface.

The MythDora project was created in the spring of 2005 by Dennis Hand. It started out as a Fedora 3 distro heavily customized around ivtv & nvidia hardware. After the initial release, Ryan Pisani joined and assisted in feature enhancements and setup tools. Ryan was followed by Jarod Wilson who joined in early 2007 and brought further customizations and enhancements to the project.

Today the project is maintained by Ryan Pisani & Jarod Wilson.

MythDora started out using a mixture of packages provided from multiple 3rd party repos. ATrpms.net was our major package provider, along with livna, dribble, dag and others. This mixture of packages worked very well out of the box, but upgrade ability was quite minimal due to conflicts. The introduction of rpmfusion in 2008 paved the way for MythDora to use a stable repo that provided most of the packages we use in the distro today. MythDora 10.21 is the first of our versions that seamlessly was upgradable from one version of MythTV to the next.

MythDora is now a mature project compared to where we started. We have a solidified feature set, build tools, and a configuration framework that assists us in creating a more stable & upgradable distribution than we could previously.

Update:

Ryan Pisani has announced the release of MythDora 12.23, a Fedora-based Linux distribution designed to simplify the installation of MythTV on a home theatre PC: "Mythdora 12.23 has been released. There are a few changes from 10.21 but mostly on the cosmetic side of things. We're now using the stock MythTV theme out of the box, as well as stock paths. General features: Fedora 12 + updates; MythTV 0.23-rc2; Linux kernel 2.6.32.11; LIRC 0.8.6. DVD features: GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce and Ratpoison desktops; NVIDIA driver packages 195, 173 and older 96; Handbrake 0.9.4; live CD features: Xfce desktop environment; NVIDIA 195 driver package; ability to change time zone in first boot configuration. Changes in MythDora 12: the auto-installation method has been removed; the front-end now heavily relies on the time zone of the system matching the backend...."